The Dying Days

Book 0: The Malabar House Series

by Vaseem Khan

Genres: Female Sleuths; Crime Fiction; Historical Thrillers

Synopsis

A priceless manuscript. A missing scholar. A trail of riddles. Bombay, 1950 For over a century, one of the world's great treasures, a six-hundred-year-old copy of Dante's The Divine Comedy, has been safely housed at Bombay's Asiatic Society. But when it vanishes, together with the man charged with its care, British scholar and war hero, John Healy, the case lands on Inspector Persis Wadia's desk. Uncovering a series of complex riddles written in verse, Persis - together with English forensic scientist Archie Blackfinch - is soon on the trail. But then they discover the first body. As the death toll mounts it becomes evident that someone else is also pursuing this priceless artefact and will stop at nothing to possess it . . . Harking back to an era of darkness, this second thriller in the Malabar House series pits Persis, once again, against her peers, a changing India, and an evil of limitless intent. Gripping, immersive, and full of Vaseem Khan's trademark wit, this is historical fiction at its finest.

Release date: July 8, 2021

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 352

Sample

Author’s Note

 

Although this is a work of fiction, many of the ingredients have been culled from fact:

 

- The copy of The Divine Comedy held at the Asiatic Society of Bombay for almost two centuries is thought to date back to the 14th century, though one historian has suggested that it dates from the 15th century. Either way it is considered a national treasure, so much so that it is now held in a bank, and only brought out for special occasions.

- The manuscript was gifted to the society in the 19th Century by Mountstuart Elphinstone, Governor of Bombay.  

- Mussolini tried to buy the manuscript in the 1930s but was rebuffed by the Indian government.

- Mussolini was rescued from an Italian prison by Otto Skorzeny, a top commando and Obersturmbannführer in the Waffen-SS, and the last chief of the Abwehr, the Nazi intelligence agency.

- Skorzeny was arrested after the war but escaped from the internment camp at Darmstadt, Germany in 1948. His escape was engineered as I have described in the book.

- Skorzeny later turned up in Egypt where he worked as a military advisor for Gamal Abdel Nasser. He later spent time in Argentina, as an advisor to President Juan Perón and acted as a bodyguard for Eva Perón. He died in 1975, aged 67.

- George Wittet was the principal architect behind the Gateway to India monument. He is buried in the Sewri Christian Cemetery in Bombay.

- The POW camp at Vincigliata (the Castello di Vincigliata Campo P.G ) housed many senior British prisoners.

- The book cipher clues in the novel were all created from the 1611 King James Bible – which can be found online.

- Freemason’s Hall is a prominent building in Mumbai, over a century old, and largely as I have described. The Freemasons have been in India since the 1700s. They are still going strong.

- Byron’s poem So We’ll Go No More A Roving reads as follows:

 

So, we’ll go no more a roving

So late into the night,

Though the heart be still as loving,

And the moon be still as bright.

 

For the sword outwears its sheath,

And the soul wears out the breast,

And the heart must pause to breathe,

And love itself have rest.

 

Though the night was made for loving,

And the day returns too soon,

Yet we’ll go no more a roving

By the light of the moon.

Chapter 1

The dog watched her as she toiled up the steps. Thirty steps, shimmering in the late morning sun. At the summit a security guard was attempting to shoo away a limbless beggar strategically positioned at the base of one of the portico’s Doric columns. She wondered how he’d made it up the steps.

The guard raised his lathi but then caught sight of her out of the corner of his eye. Something in her expression stayed his hand. Or perhaps it was her khaki uniform and the revolver at her hip. His milky eyes widened. Like many in the city, he had yet to absorb the fact that there was now a living, breathing female police inspector among them. At times, she felt like a mythical creature, a mermaid or a fabulous Garuda bird.

She watched as he melted back towards the Society’s foyer.

The dog twitched its ears, lolling on its forepaws. There was something knowing in its gaze, world-weary and cynical.

Persis turned back to look for her colleague. Birla had stopped a dozen steps below to wipe his forehead with a handkerchief, his dark, pockmarked face shiny with sweat. Behind him the vista opened out on to Colaba Causeway and the Horniman Circle Gardens. The road was alive with traffic: cars, trucks, bicycles, a red double-decker bus, the side of its upper deck pasted with an advert for Pond’s talcum powder. Tongas ferried passengers at a leisurely pace while handcartwallahs moved load around the city. Below the steps a row of wizened men sat on the pavement beneath black umbrellas selling everything from fruit to wooden dolls.

Birla caught up with her. ‘It’s just a missing book,’ he muttered. ‘Why does it need two of us?’

Not bothering to answer, she turned and headed into the building. The beggar salaamed her as she walked past and she realised that his arm had been hidden under his ragged shirt while he feigned disability.

 

The Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland had been around in one form or another since 1804, when James Mackintosh, a chief justice of the Bombay High Court, had established a literary group in the city. In the century and a half since, the Society had evolved into both an impressive storehouse of rare books and manuscripts, and a hub of intellectual endeavour, serving, for a time, as Bombay’s Town Hall. The building itself had been fashioned from stone transported from England. Despite the British having been shown the door more than two years earlier, the place continued to exude a sense of its colonial upbringing.

Persis had visited on infrequent occasion. Her father, Sam Wadia, sometimes came across books that, in good conscience, he could not sell on in the family enterprise. His donations to the Society were always gratefully received, even if the bill that accompanied them was not.

The Darbar Hall was as she last remembered. Whitewashed walls, dark wooden flooring, cast-iron pillars topped by ornate capitals, and Gothic chandeliers in which pigeons routinely roosted. Light flooded in from lead-lined windows to illuminate a succession of marble busts of the great and the good. Mainly white men, but the odd Indian had snuck into the parade. Steel cabinets hugged the walls, jammed with books. Ceiling fans affixed to the tops of the pillars served only to stir the heat from one end of the room to the other.

They introduced themselves to a portly man with a scrappy moustache lurking at a counter. He held up a finger as if testing the wind, then vanished through a side door, returning swiftly, with a white woman in tow.

She was tall, late-middle-aged, slightly stooped, with intense blue eyes and grey hair worked into a bun behind her head. Her features were patrician and put Persis in mind of the stone vultures that adorned the façade of her father’s bookshop. She was dressed in a starched suit, in formal grey, with an A-line skirt, flaring out from broad hips to just under the knees. The cut and cloth were expensive. Sensible shoes.

Something in her expression reminded Persis of a picture of Agatha Christie that she’d recently seen in the Times of India.

She introduced herself.

‘Yes, I recognise you.’ The woman regarded her with a steady, unblinking gaze, like that of a stuffed bird.

Persis wondered if, like many who had read of her recent exploits, she was assessing whether the young woman before her could really have merited such praise. For many, she was a publicity stunt, a trick dreamed up by post-independence liberals aimed at portraying an India thundering towards the future now that it had thrown off the British yoke.

‘My name is Neve Forrester. I’m the Society’s president. Please come with me.’

They followed her through the hall towards a wrought-iron Regency staircase leading down to the basement levels, Forrester’s heels clacking loudly on the iron steps. Persis recalled that she’d briefly met the woman once before, years ago, with her father, not that she expected the Englishwoman to remember.

Forrester spoke without glancing back. ‘How much have you been told?’

The question returned Persis to Malabar House, an hour earlier, when she’d been summoned to Roshan Seth’s office. The SP, usually morose, seemed agitated. ‘I’ve just got off the line with Shukla. He’s asked us to handle a tricky situation. Apparently, those oddballs at the Asiatic Society have a problem.’

She’d considered Seth’s words. Any matter that warranted the involvement of Additional Commissioner of Police Amit Shukla could not be dismissed as trivial. When Seth explained, she almost burst out laughing.

‘I was told you’ve lost a book,’ she now said.

Forrester stopped, turned, and held her with another low-lidded look.

Persis wished she could rephrase her words. She, better than most, understood the value of a book.

‘I felt it best not to reveal the exact nature of our loss,’ said Forrester eventually. ‘It’s a politically sensitive matter.’

Politically sensitive. That explained much, including why Shukla had diverted the call to Malabar House. In spite of Persis’s recent success in investigating the murder of a senior British diplomat, the fact remained that the small force at Malabar House was considered a standing joke by the rest of the state’s police apparatus. A handful of misfit cops in bad odour, stuffed into the basement of a corporate building that had stray dogs in the lobby and a dearth of air conditioning below the first floor. Persis had been parked there because no one knew where else to put her. Such was the antipathy she’d faced following her passing of the Indian Police Service exams that, for a while, it seemed her career would be stillborn.

But recent events had changed all that.

For better or worse, she’d arrived in the national psyche.

‘We are a treasure house, Inspector,’ continued Forrester. ‘Stored within these walls are priceless artefacts: books, coins, manuscripts, records. It would be a mistake to dismiss the importance of our work.’ She turned and continued down the staircase.

Birla rolled his eyes, then shuffled off behind her.

They arrived in the basement and passed through a reading room: tiled floors and reading lamps, the familiar, comforting smell of old volumes. Here the bookcases were polished Burma teak. Plush reading chairs and sprung sofas were dotted around the place, some occupied; an elderly white man dozed in a leather wing chair.

They arrived at a dark wood door, manned by a guard sitting on a wooden stool. An engraved plaque was bolted above the door, bearing a Latin inscription – AN VERITAS, AN NIHIL – below it, the English translation: The Truth, or Nothing.

The guard leaped to his feet as Forrester loomed into view.

‘Our Special Collections room,’ said the Englishwoman. ‘We call it the Crypt.’

They found themselves in a large, well-lit room, double-heighted, with a sunken floor.

Around the room were numerous glass cases and steel cupboards. A series of long, polished tables ran through the centre of the room with reading aids – magnifying glasses, manuscript blocks, spring callipers – laid out along their length. Anglepoise lamps were positioned at regular intervals. The air was ripe with the rich, solid smell of learning.

A marble counter was set on the room’s eastern side behind which lurked an Indian male. Persis could see a steel door behind the counter but other than that there were no doors or windows save the one they’d entered through.

Neve Forrester waited for them to finish taking in the scene. ‘We have almost one hundred thousand artefacts at the Society but here is where we house our most valuable treasures. A five-tola coin from Emperor Akbar’s reign; a wooden bowl reputed to belong to Gautama Buddha himself; ancient maps from around the world, manuscripts so old they are written on palm leaves. We have in this room a Shakespeare First Folio dated 1623 – there are only about two hundred known copies in the world; we have a copy of both volumes of A Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World by James Cook, and a two-hundred-year-old History of the World by Sir Walter Raleigh.’ Her eyes gleamed. ‘But our most priceless artefact is a copy of Dante Alighieri’s La Divina Commedia – The Divine Comedy – one of the two oldest copies in the world. It’s been dated back more than six hundred years. And now that manuscript is missing.’

Birla gave a small puff of annoyance. ‘How valuable can an old book really be?’

Forrester’s gaze threatened to annihilate the sub-inspector where he stood. Persis didn’t need an answer.

She recalled now the last time the manuscript had made headlines.

It had been put on display just after the war when a noted Dante scholar from the London branch of the Società Dante Alighieri had arrived in the city to deliver a lecture. The talk had ended in chaos – rioters, in the grip of independence fervour, had attacked the Society. They’d stopped short of torching the place or looting its treasures, but the British expert had had to be smuggled out by a rear entrance and whisked back to the airport, his ardour for Dante forgotten in his desire to flee the manifest perils of the subcontinent.

In the aftermath, the newspapers had rehashed the old rumour that Benito Mussolini had offered one million dollars to the Indian government for the manuscript back in the 1930s, a staggering sum. The offer had been quietly refused. Mussolini was no longer around to make another offer, having been hung by the heels in Milan at the end of the war, though the new Italian government continued to insist that the ancient manuscript be returned to its homeland.

She understood now why Forrester had described the loss of the manuscript as politically sensitive.

‘Tell me what happened.’

Forrester pursed her lips, her expression grave. ‘Almost two years ago the Society hired a new Curator of Manuscripts. A scholar by the name of John Healy. Have you heard of him?’

Persis shook her head.

‘John Healy is something of a celebrity in the world of palaeography. He studied at Cambridge before securing a research position there. He made his name working on thirteenth-century manuscripts ascribed to a monk known as “the Tremulous Hand of Worcester”. This particular scholar is believed to have sat at Worcester Priory – in England – and worked on numerous manuscripts, annotating them in a distinctive fashion: the notes – or glosses – that he produced are leftward leaning and written in a “shaky” hand. John produced the definitive work on the Hand’s extensive career, even conjecturing as to his identity – something that had remained a mystery till then. The work brought him worldwide attention in the scholarly community, and he seemed set for a stellar academic career.

‘And then the war intervened. John was a patriot. He signed up to fight and somehow ended up on the front lines. He was captured in North Africa and spent almost a year in a prisoner of war camp. Following the war, he returned to England a hero, and shortly thereafter resumed his career.’ She paused. ‘You can imagine our delight when he contacted us in the winter of 1947 to express an interest in coming to Bombay. He wanted to spend some time working with our copy of The Divine Comedy. I discussed it with the board and persuaded them to offer him the role of Curator of Manuscripts – the previous curator had recently passed away. I never expected him to accept. But he came out here, stayed for a month, and decided it was to his liking. I was delighted when he agreed to take up the position.’

‘What was his interest in The Divine Comedy?’

‘John is one of the world’s foremost Dante scholars. It became an obsession for him after the war. He was producing a new English translation. John was a linguistic historian, among his other talents.’

‘He worked here?’ Persis indicated the room around them.

‘Yes. We do not permit The Divine Comedy manuscript to leave the Crypt – unless it’s for a public exhibition. But we haven’t had one of those since that unfortunate incident in ’46.’

‘When did you realise it was missing?’

Her eyes clouded over. ‘Frankly, it was John’s absence we noted first. He failed to come into work yesterday. This was unusual, to say the least. John is a workaholic and rarely deviates from his routine. Each morning he’s here at the opening of our doors – at precisely seven a.m. He’s never late and he takes only one day off a week – Sunday.

‘Nevertheless, we did not try to contact him. He was more than entitled to time off and I had no wish to intrude on his privacy. But when he failed to show up again this morning, I decided to call his home. No answer. I became worried and so I sent one of the peons around. There appeared to be no one there.’ She stopped. ‘I’m not a naturally suspicious person, Inspector, and, heaven knows, John has never given us any reason to doubt him. But when you’re responsible for such treasures as I am, one cannot help but be overcautious. I asked Mr Pillai, our strongroom librarian, to check on The Divine Comedy manuscript. That was when we discovered it was missing.’

Missing. The word tolled in Persis’s mind. A priceless manuscript and a famous British scholar. Both missing. It defied the odds that the two were unconnected.

‘Let’s assume for a moment that John took the manuscript—’

‘I’m not making that accusation,’ interrupted Forrester. ‘Not yet.’

‘I understand. But let’s assume, for the purposes of conjecture, that he did. How would he have been able to get it out of here?’

‘Follow me.’ She led them to the marble counter Persis had noted earlier. A red ledger was chained to the counter.

‘Anyone wishing to examine one of our rarer artefacts must present an authorised requisition here. To Mr Pillai.’ Forrester indicated the nervous-looking Indian behind the counter. The small man, balding and bespectacled, nodded at her. With his liquid eyes and sad expression, he put her in mind of a depressed lemur. ‘Mr Pillai notes the request in the ledger, then goes into the strongroom behind him’ – she indicated the steel door behind the counter – ‘and returns with the artefact. The individual may then examine the work within the confines of the Crypt before returning it to Mr Pillai.’

‘Who authorises these requisitions?’

‘Two members of the board must sign a requisition. For longer-term researchers such as John – who was also a staff member – we naturally provide an ongoing approval.’

Persis turned to Pillai. ‘I assume Healy came here the day before yesterday and took out the manuscript?’

‘Yes, madam.’ The short man spoke with the clipped manner of a Dravidian from the deep south.

‘At what time did he return it?’

‘At nine p.m. Our official closing time. I noted it in the register.’

‘And you saw it? With your own eyes?’

Pillai’s expression became queasy. He glanced fearfully at Forrester. ‘I – I thought so.’

‘Please explain.’

He stepped backwards to the steel vault door behind him, unlocked it, went inside, and returned swiftly with a carved wooden box roughly eighteen inches on a side and four in height. He set the box down on the counter, then said, ‘The Divine Comedy manuscript is kept inside this box. Each night when Professor Healy returns the box to me, I check inside.’

He removed a key from his pocket, unlocked the box, lifted the lid, and turned the box around. Inside was a large volume, wrapped in red silk.

‘This is what I saw when he returned it. Naturally, I assumed it was The Divine Comedy.’

Persis looked at Forrester. ‘May I?’

The Englishwoman nodded.

Persis lifted out the volume, set it down on the counter, then unwrapped it from its cape of red cloth. She had handled old volumes before – in her father’s bookshop – and was careful with her movements.

What lay before her was a copy of the King James Bible, beautifully bound in polished black leather. She knew the book – her father sold them in the bookshop.

She looked at Pillai. ‘I take it you didn’t check beneath the red silk?’

He shook his head wretchedly.

‘Tell me, did Healy have a bag with him, or a satchel?’

‘Yes. He always carried a leather bag with him. It contained his notebooks.’

‘So, in theory, all he had to do was swap the manuscript for the Bible, put the manuscript in his bag, and walk out of the door with it.’

‘The whole thing wouldn’t have taken more than a few seconds,’ remarked Birla behind her. She’d almost forgotten he was there.

‘Was anyone else present at the time he left here?’

‘No,’ said Pillai.

‘Did anyone requisition the manuscript yesterday, when Healy was absent?’

Forrester replied, ‘Only one other person currently has permission to view The Divine Comedy. An Italian scholar named Franco Belzoni; he wasn’t here yesterday.’

‘I’ll need his details.’ Persis turned back to Pillai. ‘Was anyone other than you working the counter yesterday or this morning?’

‘No.’

‘Does anyone else have access to the strongroom?’

‘No.’ He hung his head, his misery complete.

‘Mr Pillai has worked here for thirty years,’ said Forrester sharply. ‘He has nothing to do with this.’

Persis refrained from replying. She was early in her career but knew enough to know that suspicion was a democratic beast. It devoured anyone and everyone in the vicinity of a crime. ‘Why would Healy take the manuscript? Assuming it was him?’

‘A question I cannot answer,’ replied Forrester. ‘Yes, the manuscript is incredibly valuable, but John was a scholar. To him the value of such a work cannot be measured in monetary terms.’

Birla snorted. ‘You have a very flowery view of academics,’ he said, earning a glare from the Englishwoman.

‘Have you searched his home?’ asked Persis.

‘I don’t have a key to his residence,’ said Forrester. ‘Besides, it wouldn’t be right for me to break down his door and ransack his home.’ It was clear from her tone that this was precisely what she expected Persis to now do.

‘I’ll need a list of his colleagues, friends, and other acquaintances. Anyone he may have associated with.’

‘I shall draw one up immediately. Though his circle was very small. He was a guarded man, completely focused on his work.’

Persis looked down at the Bible. She wondered where Healy had purchased the volume. It was a Blackletter edition – a faithful rendering of the 1611 King James Bible using the same Blackletter font and English grammar employed in the original and printed in the sixteen-inch ‘pulpit folio’ format. A collector’s item. Presumably, any number of bookshops in the city sold it.

Her fingertips brushed over the leather binding, the gold lettering reflecting the overhead lighting. On an impulse, she lifted the cover and looked inside the flyleaf.

She was surprised to find writing on the normally blank page.

 

What’s in a name?

Akoloutheo Aletheia

 

Below this was a signature and a date: 6 February 1950.

The day before yesterday.

‘Is this Healy’s signature?’

Forrester peered at the page. ‘Yes.’ She seemed shocked. Persis guessed she hadn’t bothered to look inside the Bible.

‘The 6th was the last day he was here,’ continued Persis. ‘The day, presumably, that he stole the manuscript. Why would he leave this inscription behind? . . . Akoloutheo Aletheia.’ The words felt strange on her tongue. ‘Do you have any idea what this means?’

‘It’s ancient Greek,’ replied Forrester, still hypnotised by the page. ‘My Greek is rusty, but I believe “akoloutheo” means “to follow”, and “aletheia” means “truth”.’

‘Follow the truth,’ whispered Persis. It had the ring of an incantation.

What was Healy attempting to communicate? She was certain he was trying to tell them something. But why? And what did the first sentence have to do with the second? What’s in a name? It sounded familiar, but she couldn’t place it.

‘I’ll need to take this,’ she said. She nodded at Birla who wrapped the Bible back in its silk covering and then tucked it under his arm.

A thought occurred to her. ‘Do you have a photograph of Healy?’

‘Follow me,’ said Forrester.

She led them back up to the Darbar Hall, to a large noticeboard propped on an easel. A collage of flyers and notices were pinned to the board. She pointed at an old newspaper cutting. The headline read: ‘Famed British academic to take up position at Bombay Asiatic Society.’ Beneath the headline was a photograph of Forrester and a cluster of elderly board members, both white and native. In the very midst of them stood a tall blond white man, wearing a tailored suit and eyeglasses. He looked frankly back at the photographer, unsmiling. There was something reserved in his gaze, Persis thought.

‘How old was he?’

‘I believe he was in his late thirties. Possibly thirty-eight or thirty-nine.’

He looks older than his years, she thought. ‘Where does he live?’

Chapter 10

Erin Lockhart had requested a meeting at her residence, back at the southern tip of the city, a grand bungalow just yards from the Church of St John the Evangelist, better known in Bombay as the Afghan Church. The British had raised the church to commemorate the dead of the First Afghan War and the terrible retreat from Kabul in 1842 that had cost the lives of some sixteen thousand British soldiers and their families, forced to slog through the winter snows of the Hindu Kush in a doomed attempt to reach Jalalabad. Such was the shock of the debacle that the Governor-General of India at the time, Lord Auckland, had suffered a stroke upon hearing the news.

Lockhart’s bungalow was in the Navy Nagar cantonment, an area that housed senior personnel from the Indian Navy. A checkpoint had been established during the war and Persis was forced to present her credentials before entering.

The whitewashed bungalow glittered in the late afternoon sun, a navy pennant flapping from a red-tiled roof in a gentle breeze rolling in off the sea.

She found Lockhart on a wide, lush lawn that sloped down towards a rocky beach. Palm trees made regimented lines either side of the lawn, and a white picket fence marked its furthest boundary. A small white dog yapped after a ball.

The maid that had let her in returned to the porch as Lockhart stood in the sunlight examining an object set on a table before her – a spinning wheel, faded and cracked.

‘What do you think?’

Persis examined the wheel. ‘It’s seen better days.’

‘Wrong,’ said Lockhart. ‘As each day passes, this particular wheel gains value. It belonged to one Mohandas K. Gandhi.’

Like most Indians, Persis knew the story.

In 1932, Gandhi had been imprisoned by the British in Pune. During his incarceration, he had decided to begin making his own thread with a charkha, a portable spinning wheel. What started as a means of passing the time soon became a symbol of the resistance, with Gandhi encouraging his countrymen to make their own cloth instead of buying British cotton.

Now, the wheel was part and parcel of the Mahatma’s legacy.. . .